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Guedes v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives

After the tragic mass shooting in Las Vegas, the phrase
“bump stock” entered the public lexicon. What was, and
always has been, a gun-range novelty was suddenly the subject of
national discussion. In the months following the tragedy, Congress
considered and ultimately rejected a law banning these devices.
Eager to seize political capital, however, the Trump administration
sought to ban them anyway.

The administration faced one problem, though: the Constitution.
As anyone who’s seen School House Rock can tell you, only
Congress has the ability to write new laws. So the administration
attempted to give itself such a power by
“reinterpreting” an existing law: the National Firearms
Act of 1934 (NFA), which heavily regulates
“machineguns.”

For decades, Congress, the executive branch, and the people
shared a common understanding: the definition of
“machinegun” in the NFA was clear, applying only to
weapons that fired continuously from a single function. Bump
stocks, which require substantial user input to fire, had never
been considered “machineguns,” with precedent spanning
multiple administrations. President Trump announced that his
administration was changing course. The president expressly
declined to go through Congress, instead directing officials to
redefine bump-stock devices as “machineguns.” In turn,
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) broke from
decades of precedent and granted itself a new power to ban a widely
owned firearm accessory.

This expansion of regulatory authority, motivated by political
expediency, cannot stand. Whether one agrees that bump stocks
should be regulated or not, this change is not limited to a ban on
bump stocks. ATF has asserted the complete authority to ban any new
class of weapons that federal law did not address. This approach
impermissibly expands the executive branch’s power to rewrite
criminal laws and threatens to stifle new developments in firearm
technology.

The new rule, making felons of an unknowable number of
Americans, was set to take effect March 21. To prevent this, a
group of Second Amendment organizations filed a lawsuit in federal
court. They sought a preliminary injunction to stop the government
from enforcing the new rule, but were denied. Because the effective
date is so close, the appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
D.C. Circuit was expedited. Cato filed a brief addressing issues
that no other amicusdiscusses:
that the executive branch cannot use the administrative process to
accomplish legislative goals that Congress declined to enact.

The implications of this case extend far beyond bump stocks.
Regardless of what public opinion is at this moment, the law means
what it says. The executive branch has the power to interpret
existing law, not write new ones. The administration argues,
essentially, that because the statute did not provide a separate
definition of the terms that make up the definition of
“machinegun,” that it gets to insert their own meaning.
That simply isn’t the case. Administrative interpretations
are supposed to do just that—interpret existing law—not
give new meaning to an old one.

If the government really wants to regulate bump stocks, it needs
to do so by passing a new law, not by assigning new meaning to an
old one. The Founders weren’t short-sighted; there’s a
reason laws that affect the entire nation have to come through
Congress, not through bureaucratic reimagination.